Page 38 - The Ethics of ASEAN

The Ethics of ASEAN

Bentham in the 19th century, the idea was to calculate the greatest good for the greatest
number. But the broader “consequentialist” idea of results-based ethics can be traced
back to Mozi, a contemporary of Confucius, who advocated acting for the benefit of all
based on results, famously formulated by the pragmatic leader of China Deng Xiaoping: “It
doesn’t matter if the cat is black or white as long as it catches mice”.
With advances in mathematics, the social sciences and business management
methods we are far more capable of measuring the results of an ethical decision or
policy than in the past. For example, in the area of human development, results-based
ethics are measured in the ethical treatment people of people in companies, in assessing
government labour policies and in projects targeting disadvantaged populations. In 2019
the Nobel Prize in Economics was awarded to Michael Kremer, Abhijit Banerjee and Esther
Duflo for their research on methods and field experiments that test and measure different
human development interventions. 19
One technique, called A/B testing, was derived from controlled experiments in medicine
and marketing and then was applied to human development. In its simplest form, you
test a project with group A and compare results with a control group B. The 2019 Nobel
Prize laureates measured results for improving children’s education, reducing poverty and
improving health.

Figure 4: Abhijit Bannerjee, Esther Duflo and Michael Kremer received the Nobel Prize in Economics
for 2019 for their work on results-based human development methods- photo courtesy of The Nobel
Foundation

A typical results-based ethical problem concerns risk. With the Covid pandemic of 2020-
2022, the world witnessed the power of CRISPR gene editing to make vaccines. But what
about the ethical question of using CRISPR to modify human genes that are reproduced
in the next generation (called germline editing)? We now have the potential to do so and it
is even technically “easy” compared to older gene-editing technology. Ethically, scientists
and ethicists have reached a consensus today that the results of germline editing must be
considered “safe” before being used. In practice, this means that the ethical result must

19 The Nobel Prize announcement for Economics for 2019 https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/economic-
sciences/2019/press-release/. This contains a link to a popular science description of their work on poverty
https://www.nobelprize.org/uploads/2019/10/popular-economicsciencesprize2019-2.pdf downloaded 8
February 2022

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